I first came across the Trypillian culture when I was a student at Oxford, about 25 years ago. The sites were not presented to us as particularly interesting at the time, just another Neolithic culture with huge settlements. There is a somewhat condescending perception in Western Europe and North America of archaeological research carried out in the former Soviet bloc, especially at the height of the Cold War. Although some of it was truly groundbreaking.
I thought about Nebelivka and the monuments associated with it later, when I began working with anthropologist David Graeber on our joint book “Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” which will soon be published in Ukrainian. My co-author, unfortunately, passed away before its publication. As an anthropologist, he was interested in whether we, archaeologists, had evidence of the existence in early societies of something like a city, egalitarian in its social structure? I described to him my understanding of the ancient mega-settlements from Ukraine: very large in size, with a significant population density, dating back 5–6 thousand years. But they do not want to call them cities because of the lack of hierarchical organization. There were no pyramids, no temples, no palaces, no rich burials. The dwellings in the Trypillian mega-settlements are arranged in circles — like the rings of a tree trunk. David Graeber asked: why can’t we talk about urbanization? Why shouldn’t we call them cities? So we started thinking about this issue.
Our book is a counternarrative for Weizmann, a kind of forensic examination, where something can’t necessarily be proven, and it’s not always possible to determine who is guilty. The only thing you can do for sure is to provide evidence. It can destabilize the official narrative, whether it’s the government’s or the police’s. It works like picking holes here and there, causing the overall picture to slowly waver. In a court of law, that might be enough to close the case. When the official narrative starts to waver, other possible narratives emerge in history, filling in the new gaps..t I thought: this is a great description of what we were trying to do. Why not work on something together?
The territories of present-day Iraq, Pakistan, China, Mexico, Egypt are locations where historians usually look for the origins of urban life. There are urban traditions here that arose seemingly out of nowhere, without being based on previous forms. In my opinion, we can now add Ukraine to this list, because the so-called mega-settlements meet the criteria for the scale of early cities.
*We need to use more imagination in how we use our living spaces..t If we look at the material remains of the Trypillian settlements, we see that these people found a way to make everyday life incredibly interesting. For example, they made the most beautiful ceramics in ordinary households. **Every family seemed to have an artist. Mega-settlements are like huge colonies of artists. In addition to pottery, they made figurines, beautiful miniature models of houses. By comparison, the ceramics of the early cities of Mesopotamia (I worked at some in Iraq) are incredibly boring: depressing, simple, unadorned, very standardized, mass-produced, like our modern things. The Trypillian products are very different. They seem to have been made by a rather playful society in which artistic creativity was very highly valued.
be you. 